


Luck Be a Lady

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Angsty Schmoop, Formerly Abused Animal, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, pet adoption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 08:13:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6510061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Get a dog, Clint says, as though a dog is going to prevent Steve from trying to dismantle the shadows, or Bucky from trying to dismantle Steve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Luck Be a Lady

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the mass shifted over from tumblr, and brilliantly examined for error by cabloom. Also, for once, the animal abuse doesn't happen in the story - donate to your local shelters, if you can. Money is nice, but time is even better: the more time dogs and cats spend around volunteers, the less likely they are to react poorly (or just over react) to potential owners, and on top of that you get to play with animals, which is good for you as well as the animal! (I don't speak from experience here, mostly because my whole extended family works for shelters, so when I "volunteer" I'm handed a scoop and a bucket, and hey, if you want that job, shelters need help scooping poop too!)

“A dog?” Steve blinked at Clint, folded his arms across his sweat-soaked shirt. He glanced over at Sam – who was sitting in a corner of the gym, probably doing unspeakable things to Steve’s phone. Again. Sam insisted he was lurking in the gym to make sure Clint and Steve played by the rules, but since Barton had hurled a dumbbell at Steve’s head before giving him a wedgie and Sam hadn’t said a word, Steve was pretty certain there _were_ no rules. Just to make sure, he had glanced at Sam before bulldozing Hawkeye with one of his spare punching bags. “Why would we need a dog?”

“They’re good for. Disabled people,” Clint wheezed, letting Steve haul him up off the mats. “You know -” he tapped his ear, the Stark aid barely noticeable “- disabled? Did they have that word in your time?”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Yeah, Barton, they did. It was one of those adjectives that knocked you right off the eugenically desirable list. And I was deaf in one ear before your parents even _existed_.”

“Boys,” Sam called, still staring at Steve’s phone with a diabolical grin. “No bickering before lunch.”

“Besides,” Steve continued, ignoring Sam and hoping that he’d stop getting angry messages from something called twitter. “Neither of us are disabled, with the serum. It’s not like Bucky’s arm is a hindrance.” Not like some of the prosthetics he’d seen at the VA, pieces of plastic that the vets seemed more than happy to leave at home. Tony was working on that, apparently, his newest DOD contract for limbs and not bombs.

“Really?” Clint raised an eyebrow. “Neither of you has any trouble with open spaces. Loud noises. Sudden movements?”

Steve scowled at him. He couldn’t very well deny it; Clint had drawn the short straw for the last two missions, and been sent out to Brooklyn to fetch Bucky and Steve. The first time, he’d come in through the bedroom window and then gone right back out of it when Steve leaped out of bed and tackled them both three stories to the ground. The second time, Clint had been smart enough to try the door, but Steve had been out grocery shopping and Bucky’s reactions tended toward the “shoot first and ask later” variety.

He sighed. “So, what, you want us to take home an animal and shoot it when the nightmares get too bad?”

Clint blanched. “No!” he shrieked. “Why would you do that? Is that what you _did_ to dogs in the 1930s?”

Steve huffed. He could feel the tension building around his eyes, his eyebrows drawing down. Sam, as always, stepped in to interpret at just the right time. “Clint, Steve was a kid in the ‘30s, he wasn’t shooting anything. Steve -”

“Ignore him?” Steve suggested, rubbing his face. That tended to be Sam’s standard solution when the Avengers started saying too many strange things.

“Well, no.” Sam shrugged, raised his eyebrows at Steve’s incredulous expression. “Dogs are good emotional support animals. They’re loving, and they’re a familiar warm body in the house. You’re telling me Barnes does just as well when you’re gone as when you’re home?”

Steve exhaled hard and shook his head. They both needed their space – they hadn’t, as kids, but a century ago they hadn’t seen their failures painted across the other’s skin – but when Steve left, Bucky took _everything_ as a threat. Steve had come home last week to find their rickety radiator torn to pieces and leaking hot water across the wooden floors.

“I’m not saying a dog is going to fix all your problems,” Sam added, wrinkling his nose to indicate his uncertainty that a host of trained psychiatrists could fix all their problems. “But it couldn’t hurt to visit the shelter and take a look, right? See if there’s a mutt that might lure Barnes onto the street without taking cover in a dumpster?” Steve’s nose wrinkled for a whole different reason – climbing into a half-full dumpster to talk Bucky down had made his top five list of “unpleasant ways to spend an evening.” Especially when it happened for the third time in as many weeks.

* * *

“A dog?” Bucky looked just as skeptical as Steve had, running human fingers through his newly cropped hair. “You want a dog?”

“Erm.” Steve couldn’t say that he _did_ want a dog. Sure, he’d liked animals well enough as a kid, but the ones he recalled had all lived on the streets, cats sneaking into a kitchen for the milk, dogs rooting between tenements in the garbage heaps, or hanging around under the carts in the market. “Sam and Clint suggested it?”

“Oh, god.” Bucky rolled his eyes. “Don’t you stand up to _anybody_ anymore, pal? We can barely handle ourselves.” He gestured into the living room, the light glinting off of his metal arm. Steve took in the scene and winced. He’d come home and heard an unfamiliar noise – zoned out, briefly, to the popping sound of sap in a burning forest, fiery detritus of a bomb that had nearly wiped out the Commandos – and torn through the door. Well, torn the door off its hinges, which had startled Bucky away from where he’d been attempting dinner, and led to an awkward five minutes of them trying to disarm each other and destroy their living room.

Unfortunately, they’d also destroyed their dinner, because the popping noise had been bacon and Bucky was vicious with a hot frying pan.

“Sam doesn’t think we’ll kill a dog?” Steve replied, voice telegraphing his insecurities. “He says they’re very loving.”

Bucky snorted, lips curving up into what passed for a smile in this new life. He didn’t reach for Steve, but his pale eyes thawed a touch, and he didn’t flinch when Steve closed the distance between them and wound himself into Bucky’s open arms. “You’re pretty damn loving, punk,” Bucky drawled, kissing the words into Steve’s hair when Steve buried his face into the warmth of Bucky’s neck. “And I still try to kill you all the time.”

Steve blew a raspberry into Bucky’s neck and tightened his embrace. “I hate to break it to you, jerk, but either you’re hardly trying or you’re not very good, because I’m not remotely dead.” He mouthed the words into Bucky’s skin, and pretended that it didn’t ache when metal and human arms squeezed Steve’s chest so tightly he couldn’t breathe.

“Fine, Rogers,” Bucky whispered. “We’ll go get a damn dog. But Sam is taking it when we traumatize the poor mutt.”

* * *

This was a terrible idea. Steve had known that it would be. The shelter was noisy, filled with people and cats and ringing phones that left Bucky on edge and reaching for the knife tucked in his belt. And that was before they’d even reached the kennels, which smelled faintly enough of urine and bleach, but still made Steve gag. The barking ricocheted over the concrete, dozens of dogs throwing themselves toward the mesh of their cages, yapping and squealing and generally acting like more of a threat than Tony and Clint combined.

“Maybe we should go home?” Steve tried to say, breathing through his shirt, but Bucky had his chin stuck out and Steve knew that weren’t going anywhere but forward. Forward march - literally - Bucky gripping Steve’s free hand and dragging them down the horrible corridor of noise.

After two circuits, Steve’s head finally stopped pounding, and he could start to focus on the individual dogs and not just the overwhelming sounds and smells.

“We also have puppies!” the staff member shouted, looking concerned at Steve’s pale face and the shirt over his nose. “In separate pens, across the courtyard! It’s much -”

“Where are his ears?” Bucky interrupted, dragging Steve to a halt outside one of the cages. Inside, a dog that had to come up to Steve’s thighs stood near the door, peering at them with an enormous white head and no ears.

“They were cropped,” the staff member explained, squatting down slightly to put himself at the dog’s level. “She’s a pitbull mix. People raise them for dog fights – she was brought in a few months ago, somebody abandoned her by the side of the road. We think she wasn’t aggressive enough, or maybe she didn’t breed well, so her owners got rid of her.”

The dog looked plenty aggressive from where Steve was; he was willing to bet he could stick his entire hand in her mouth and come out with a bloody stump of a wrist. Bucky, however, had a too-familiar frown on his face, and had already pushed his right hand toward the cage for her to sniff.

“Be careful,” the staff member warned. “We think she was abused, before she came here. She doesn’t always react well to men.”

_I hate you_ , Steve texted Sam, because he already knew they’d be walking out of the shelter with an enormous white and brown terror, who would probably spend most of her time terri _fied_ , given that both Steve and Bucky personified “dangerous men.”

“Can we take her out?” Bucky wondered, even though the dog hadn’t made a move to sniff his outstretched hand. “What’s her name?”

The employee grinned, and unwound the leash he’d draped over his shoulders. “You sure can, just be gentle with her. Calm. We’ve been calling her Lady Liberty, but if she takes to you guys, you’re welcome to rename her.”

That particular shit-eating grin on Bucky’s face was one that Steve hadn’t seen since 1944. “Nah,” the asshole in question said, stepping back so that the shelter employee could open the kennel. “I think with a name like that, she’d fit right in.”

And Bucky was gentle, when Lady Liberty came hesitantly up to him. He settled on his knees so that her frighteningly large head was even with his face, let her sniff him before he reached out a tentative hand to rub over the top of her skull, behind the ears she should have had. His metal hand stayed intertwined with Steve’s, gear-warmed fingers measuring Steve’s pulse through the veins in his wrist.

Then Liberty decided she liked Bucky just fine, and knocked him backward into the floor so she could lick his face, giving Steve a glimpse of the scars littering her ribs and side.

* * *

“No.” Steve folded his arms, glared at Lady Liberty when she wiggled her butt and dropped backward into a hopeful crouch, waiting for a game.

“You’re the voice of authority, there,” Bucky snickered, spinning on the bar stools they’d bought to replace the broken kitchen chairs.

“I wasn’t telling _her_ no,” Steve pointed out, batting Bucky’s hand away from the jar of dog treats on the counter. “I was telling _you_ no! Between you and Clint she’s going to weigh more than a house.”

Liberty spotted the jar of treats and gave a sharp bark. Bucky laughed louder than he should have, when Steve set one on her head and waited for her to knock it off and eat it. Bucky laughed more than he had for months, now that they had Lady Liberty home.

Steve squatted down and let Liberty bowl him over, licking his chin before tearing off to find her favorite squeaky toy. Lady Liberty went through dog toys faster than Bucky and Steve went through furniture.

“Park?” Bucky asked, hauling Steve easily to his feet, pressing his lips to the cheek that Liberty hadn’t covered in drool. Steve nodded, resting his hands on Bucky’s waist and breathing in the smell of his shampoo, smiling at the suggestion. Before Liberty, Bucky had never wanted to step outside, too afraid of the crowds, of the sudden sounds – too afraid of himself.

“Park,” he agreed, and Liberty barked because she knew the word, running to the door where they kept her leash. She hadn’t cured their nightmares, and they hadn’t cured hers – she still flinched and ran from strangers, growled whenever Tony came into the room – but between the three of them, they had enough loving to go around.

“Good boy,” Bucky approved mockingly, and snorted when Steve tickled him, fighting back until Liberty nudged her way between them, demanding their attention. “Punk,” he added, speaking to Steve or the dog, but he kept his hand on Liberty’s head and his left side tucked under Steve’s arm when they headed out the door.


End file.
